14 DAY TRIAL // Adobe has just released an updated version of Flash Player, as the company kicks off the first patching cycle of the year for its software.
Flash Player 28.0.0.137 doesn’t have a change log just yet, but given that it lands on the second Tuesday of January, it’s safe to assume that the focus has been on security fixes.
The second Tuesday of each month is being used by several software companies, including Microsoft and Adobe, to ship updates for their products in order to address the security issues that were reported since the previous rollout.
Security fixes for Flash Player are particularly important for IT admins and consumers alike, as Adobe’s client runtime environment remains a very popular piece of software that runs on millions of systems across the world. In the past, however, Flash Player proved to be one of the main targets for cybercriminals, and a worrying number of exploits were launched at computers running outdated versions.
Going dark
Flash Player, however, will be retired by the end of 2020 and Adobe says that it’s currently working with its partners, including here the largest software and operating system developing companies, to make the transition to newer solutions as smoothly as possible.
“As open standards like HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly have matured over the past several years, most now provide many of the capabilities and functionalities that plugins pioneered and have become a viable alternative for content on the web,” Adobe said.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the world is in a rush to give up on Flash Player, so it’s critical for everyone to deploy new versions addressing vulnerabilities as soon as possible.
You can download Flash Player 28.0.0.137 for Windows, Linux, and Mac using these links. We’ll update the article with the official change log in just a few hours when Adobe officially kicks off the patching rollout and offers more information as to what’s been improved and fixed in the new version.